Lift the bonnet on the car industry

A senior member of the Prime Minister’s manufacturing task force, Roy Green, got it right on Tuesday when he ­suggested that the days of making purpose-built cars for Australia were drawing to a close. Integrating with global car production “is the only way we are going to be able to retain any car-making capability in Australia at all’’, he said.

The question is whether the federal government understands this and, if so, has the spine to stand up to foreign-owned car companies which have been playing politicians since Industry Minister
Greg Combet
was a boy.

Toyota has experienced some export success and General Motors is showing signs of change, but Ford’s future is clouded despite subsidies – including $34 million given to it early this year by Industry and Climate Change Minister Combet. That is just part of the billions of dollars of Labor handouts to the car industry, even though it should not be the government’s role to prop up favoured industries, companies or jobs. By continuing to subsidise the car industry, the government is reducing the nation’s prosperity, not enlarging it, as Julia Gillard claims is her “purpose’’.

This is why The Australian Financial Review is battling the government, General Motors and Ford to be allowed to reveal details of the interaction between them which were accidentally released to this newspaper as the result of a Freedom of Information request. The material has been temporarily suppressed, in part because it is supposedly commercially sensitive.

Given that Labor has made all Australians “co-investors’’ in car companies, that is a very thin excuse for preventing them from knowing about the lobbying that resulted in their money being poured into an industry that may shut down anyway.